Rainbow Trout

by Glenn McPherson

Many things in you pick up colour:
The chicken-hawk cry,
Light rain stripping back the body’s shadow
On the bridge

Beside which a creel lies open,
The stranger must have wanted it that way
So as to let out a little god.
How grief-riddled the red seed

Is at the knowledge it will go soon,
And where, during
The wordless hours before dawn, the dark eyes
Of a wallaby

Softly alert, you can hear its flat
Worn molars inheriting.
Almost, beyond the poplars, the road bends.
You cannot help but bend

With it. In another world
You will be the mythological one
Drawn up from the water
Full of eternity.